Thursday, April 24, 2008

Speaking of Propaganda, Comrade . . .

Periodically if you read the Washington Post (I don't personally, but I like to look at the pictures), you'll see something that looks like an article, smells like an article, and is written like an article. Don't be fooled! Check the fine print and you'll see it's a full-page ad taken out by the Russian government's Tourism/Cover-up Board. They buy space in a newspaper in America's capital, and present the message they want us to hear, in a package we are more likely to trust. (I think even conservatives in this country trust the average report in the Post more than they trust, say, this.) Check out this and this, for example.

Well, the Post finally caught on to what the Russians were doing, and on March 6th, decided they might as well make a story out of it, so they wrote this article on Russia's "global propaganda machine." One page two of the article is a reference to the recurring "feature" in their own paper:

The official government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta is using its healthy profits to fund monthly supplements in newspapers in India, Britain, Bulgaria and the United States. "Russia: Beyond the Headlines," as the publication is called, is a paid advertising supplement in The Post.

One of my favorite lines is this one:

The campaign is designed to counter what the government and many people here see as unrelenting and unfair Western criticism of declining political freedoms under President Vladimir Putin.

Let's see ... counter ... criticism ... declining ... Well, there are at least three negatives here, but I think they mostly cancel out to show Putin himself as the biggest negative in the whole picture. As the article admits, there are skeptics that simply won't be fooled by such blatant tactics. But we would be foolish ourselves to dismiss Russia's campaign as harmless. Propaganda works because it understands that people can, and in many cases, deep down they want to be fooled. No one wants to think that the Russians are deceiving us and spying on us so deeply that they have spies in positions of high authority in the CIA and the FBI ... but then we discover Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

One of the primary tactics of propaganda is relentless repetition of the message. It doesn't really matter what you think of the message on your first hearing--that's long gone when you hear it in the back of your head after the 30th hearing. That's why "Beyond the Headlines" is a regular feature. This is the same tactic used by advertising campaigns. Advertising is propaganda. The father of modern advertising, Edward Bernays, laid out how it all works in a very important and influential little book truthfully titled, Propaganda.

Another tactic of propaganda is the form the message takes. I don't care if you tell me a hundred times the world is round, if your commercial has Hitler saying it, I'll probably start to doubt the message. That's why commercials use every day people (usually women) selling every day products--if we saw the CEO of Frigidaire asking us to buy his product, our mind would drift to what he gets out of it--profit. So he has to redirect your mind to what he want you to get out of the commercial--that attractive people just like you use it. "They do? Well, I don't want to be left out," your mind says, while you think you're logically weighing pros and cons.

So the Russian government puts out its party line in newspapers: its own mouthpiece Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and features in the Post meant to look real, b/c if you don't look too carefully, you'll assume it is real. And of course that's what Putin wants you to think: that his government, his democracy, his new puppet president--that they're all real.